THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019 61
Much like Obreht herself, these char-
acters and creatures from foreign lands
are drawn to enact the grand dramas of
a new culture soon after their arrival in
the West. But as “Inland” progresses we
begin to recognize the subtle ways that
Obreht has been poking fun at various
long-recycled stereotypes—Lurie’s un-
seen interlocutor, we learn, is actually one
of the camels that he will later steal away
from the Army unit, a nod toward the
clichéd love often shared in Westerns
between a boy and his horse. The real
“cowboys” of the story, we come to find,
are the Muslim camel drivers. And Nora,
initially painted as the archetypal “woman
in distress” awaiting the return of the
men in her life, comes neither to need
nor to accept any help as she works to
hold together her fracturing household.
Discovering the particular genre con-
ventions that Obreht has chosen to
transfigure or to uphold soon becomes
central to the novel’s propulsive appeal.
Which stock character, we wonder—the
town doctor, the dogged lawman, the
wise old settler, the conniving cattle
baron—will break the mold? Which fa-
miliar scene—the Indian massacre, the
fated meeting between lawman and ban-
dit, the gritty frontierswoman’s display of
dogged perseverance—has been designed
to collapse under its own weight, mak-
ing way for some unexpected insight?
Still, reimagining the oft-imagined
is inevitably a fraught endeavor: it may
be that one can’t upend a genre with-
out being bound, in some way, to its
age-old shortcomings. In “Inland,” as
in so many Westerns, Native Ameri-
cans and Mexicans are often invoked
by the immigrants and settlers who have
come to replace them, but they are rarely
developed into complex characters in
their own right. The ubiquity of ghosts
and spirits throughout the novel appears
to signal, at first, a contemplation of the
genocidal toll of Western expansion.
“We saw them, it seemed, in every tree,
in the streets of every little pueblo, dot-
ting the horizon in their loneliness, the
unburied dead of battle upon battle,”
Lurie recounts. Passages like this call to
mind Juan Rulfo’s classic “Pedro Páramo,”
in which a man searching for his father
arrives in the Mexican countryside to
find a town populated only by spectres.
In Rulfo’s novel, the ghosts come to
symbolize a rural Mexico emptied out
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